The End of My Self-published Universe
My Writing Journey Vol. 12
This may be a long one. Last week I talked about my first real editor roles. I think it’s time now to round out the series of these posts talking about my self-published books, at least, in their non-omnibus forms. From June 2020 to February 2021 I released five and a half books…
I say and a half, because in reality it was seven, but two were re-print collections, each featuring then-exclusive short stories. So let’s get started on these seven books: three novellas, two more co-written, two collections and a book of short stories. Seven may sound a lot for less than a year (nine months!), but I was really passionate about writing at this time, and with the lockdowns, I had a lot of free time, on the weekends, between and after zoom lessons. I ended up listening to maybe months’ work of music with the time I was putting in, sitting in my house’s conservatory with headphones on, typing away. I’m sure some days I was there for eight hours or more - but what else was there to do?
My first lockdown-written tome was the fourth ‘Chapter’ of The Watchers. Above is the back cover, which I thought I’d share with you as I was always fond of the wraith eyes I put in the bottom left corner, as if The Watchers are in the book, watching you. (I brought out out my own copies for this post!) This book in a way is the finale of the series, though there is one more book. And it takes place before Volume 8 of my main Diamond Dimensions series, building towards the universe-altering event in that book though none of the characters know it. Watchers Chapter 4 was when everything was revealed, all about the villain and his plot - he actually succeeds, though not in the way he thought…
Two days after releasing that book I released the collection of Chapters 3 and 4 with a bonus short story going into the past of one of the main Watcher characters, Markus. I channelled some of what I was feeling at the time into that story, and wove into a scene where Markus goes away and comes back in my Origins book.
A month after that came the third book in The Cave series (a prequel series of sorts to the rest of the stories), written by my father with my input. Again this book could’ve stood alone - a pocket dimension that is a gigantic labyrinth that the children must move through, as the labyrinth itself moves, and there’s all sorts of sentient plants, different biomes to the bushes, topiary animals that come to life. It ends on a cliff hanger though, leading directly to the fourth book in the series.
This was really the time when I had to take a step back and really iron out everything left to write. I knew now all the books that needed to be written, and wanted to end this universe in the best most cohesive and satisfying way possible. (Who wouldn’t?) All the stories were leading to the same conclusion, tying up every thread of tapestry at three different points in the timeline, like I was weaving three different pictures at once across three looms.
The next book to come out was the conclusion to The Watchers series, a book of which I’m really proud. It’s the longest Watchers book by far, basically a long denouement, literally from the voice of a god (or pharaoh but…). In some ways inspired by the Arrowverse’s Crisis in Infinite Earths event, we see the same event at the end of Diamond Dimensions Volume 8 from the point of the view of The Watchers, and actually carries on from the end of that separate book, dealing with the aftermath that Dan avoids, whilst also continuing threads from the fourth Cave book that wasn’t even written, and tying in the Earth-based story I’d been telling in prologues and epilogues. In a way it’s the last main book in the timeline that brings nearly every character across the three series together.
The book also mirrored exactly the structure of the first chapter in The Watchers series, with ten chapters, each from the POV of a different character, in reverse order from the first book. (The three books in the middle had eight chapters, two and four only with four characters’ POVs, two chapters each.) I got to give each character a real standout hero moment, each a resolution to their somewhat unplanned arcs.
The collection above (that came out a few days after Chapter 5 by itself, in August) had two short stories from the next book I was working on, a book that would finally use Dan’s thumbnail image for his YouTube series.
The Diamond Dimensions Legacies was a book a long time in the making, in a way longer than any of the others, as I finally novelised the short videos Dan had made 2013-2015 that inspired my characterisation of his characters. I’d included nods and even locations from those videos already, kind of writing prequels for them, but felt for the completion of my universe, I had to novelise them to pay those threads off. It also gave me chance to give individual characters from the alien worlds Dan visited throughout the main series some final goodbyes, some resolutions. It also gave me a chance to bridge the gap between the main series and what would be my last main book, a novelisation and continuation of Dan’s revisit to his Diamond Dimensions mythology in 2017.
The book came out in October 2020, though I’d definitely been planning it a long while. The idea for legacy stories had been rolling around in my mind at least for two years before. I have a fond memory of talking to some friends about it before our GCSE German speaking exam - they seemed genuinely interested and impressed and it was a good way to distract my nerves.
The next book was a joy to write, but also very hard. I’d worked in my own ways explaining away Dan’s Season 2 and 3 of The Diamond Dimensions as being his clone and his descendants exploring different worlds. But this series posed many problems. The Watcher is portrayed as a villain. I was writing it more than three years after it came out. There were three episodes, the story never resolved by Dan. The last episode of his short-lived series:
I don’t blame Dan for not finishing them; it’s harder than it may look to program, film and edit all this within Minecraft. Plus, if he had finished the series, it may have gone beyond what I could work with to blend everything I had written before with what happens in this series.
Of course I could’ve just… not novelised it. But I felt I should. The fact that Dan came back to The Watcher over four years later made it significant enough. I was also very fond of his storytelling. As time went on, especially in 2015/16, Dan worked himself very hard to make little movies within Minecraft with his characters, basically his own TV show called Custom Mod Adventures. In a way I wanted to finish this Misadventures story for fans of Dan’s characters, and for myself really. They do say write the book you’d want to read, right?
The first three chapters of Misadventures are pure novelisations, the first time I’d really done this on this scale, writing down all of Dan’s speech and every action and image on screen, plus a bit more. From then on, I went on a journey with the characters, to the world of Dan’s Diamond Dimensions Season 3, to the world my book universe had visited in my dad’s book: Timelight. The villain really proved to be the witch that had cropped up in stories for years and years and the finale is in a dreamscape, overcoming nightmare fears and for Dan to finally see the good he’s done in a sequence in a world between worlds somewhat like the one in Star Wars Rebels. The book serves as an end to all twenty two books, but also, through acts of destiny, the beginning of all the books, linking to the Cave’s pocket dimensions, the origins of The Watchers, bringing together everything Diamond Dimensions - the things Dan created, the things I created, things from his videos outside of The Diamond Dimensions, things from my stories outside his videos.
It was emotional to write and emotional to think about.
In the midst of the last don’t go outside session we had to endure here, before going back to school for the final stretch of the journey with my friends, I had finished the tale I’d started when I was twelve. Now I was eighteen, and it was done, and Dan had had a son, and had achieved so much since when I wrote my first word. So had I, I guess.
“But wait, there’s one more book, right?” I hear you ask.
Yes my attentive reader there is. The fourth and final volume of The Cave, shorter than the rest, a kind of epilogue adventure written a bit more by me and less by my father, came out a month after Misadventures in February 2021.
It’s a poetic last book, as we finally discover the main mystery I’d set up with no real answer in Origins. We already knew what happened to the three child protagonists of the series (we weren’t going to kill them off!) and yet the book plays out like a tragedy, and ends on a sombre note finally tying the last thread, lining every scene of the tapestry together, so The Cave flows into Origins, flows into Diamond Dimensions, flows into The Watchers, blends like a good smoothie with lots of short stories all as one universe all moving forward like many trains reaching a station and all the passenger-characters get off and it’s all bookended by Misadventures.
But my journey with that universe didn’t finish there. Even though I had A-Level exams(ish) coming up - COVID gave my year some leeway with proper exams - there was a lot of work to go before I felt done with my Diamond Dimensions Universe.
I just had to re-edit every story into four chronological omnibus volumes. I’d be so, so thankful if you checked them out (link underlined below the button).
Thank you so much for reading! Once again I’ll link the omnibus volumes that collect all 22 books in the universe that sprouted from Dan’s videos, if you fancy checking them out in any form. (Books in this post are spread out across the first, third and mainly the fourth volume.)
Cheers,
Harvey
Congrats Harvey!!🎉